DARPA Hosts Robotic Swarm Exercise

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The Pentagon’s research branch, DARPA, is working to train robots for war. Last December, in a fake city in Mississippi, hundreds of robots have been gathered to scout an urban environment in order to obtain useful data to share with human soldiers.

The exercise was DARPA’s third test of its OFFSET (Offensive Swarm Enable Tactics) program. The program is intended to have robots assist soldiers during combat in urban environments. The robots work together as a swarm to provide increased situational awareness for small groups of infantry forces.

The robots that makeup OFFSET help grant soldiers with real-time situational awareness of their vicinity. As C4isrnet.com puts it, “it is one thing to operate with existing maps, and another entirely to operate from recently mapped space, with continuing situational awareness of possible threats and other movements through space.”

The program has been going on at least since 2017, with companies competing with innovative technologies for government contracts. Many of these companies have introduced innovations inspired by real-time strategy video games.

At the recently held exercise, the robotic swarms included both ground and flying robots. The robots were tasked with finding certain points of interest, marked with AprilTags. AprilTags are similar to QR codes, they have been used to assist the robots in the experiment by marking hazards and points of interest.

“As the swarm relayed information acquired from their tags, human swarm tacticians adaptively employed various swarm tactics their teams had developed to isolate and secure the buildings containing the identified items,” DARPA wrote.

Soldiers will be able to access the information gathered by the swarm via updated digital maps and augmented reality goggles.